LAST WEEK we showed that Canada is quietly embracing GNU/Linux. Canada’s National Bureau of Economic Research says that patents harm the poor, so there would be nothing destructive about Free software when it comes to economics.
“...Savoir-Faire Linux, Inc. has filed in the Superior Court of Quebec against the government's pension plan for choosing Microsoft software without putting the job out publicly for bid.”
--Pamela Jones, GroklawThe headline said: "Savoir-Fair Linux, Inc. sues Quebec government agency over Microsoft"
At the bottom we are appending some more valuable references about the situation in Quebec. It may matter not just because Microsoft is sued in Canada (class-action lawsuit) but also because Glyn Moody reveals more grounds for Canadian antitrust in Quebec:
Does Quebec Hate Free Software?
[...]
What's particularly disturbing here is that it looks like the regional government doesn't want anyone to question why it is going with proprietary software, and not giving free software a fair chance - that's doubly wrong. (Via @akaSassinak.)
Does Microsoft think "Rip-Off Britain" is an instruction?
In the current economic climate what do you think is the best way to keep existing customers happy and encourage them to spend more with you?
Introduce some special offers perhaps? Add extra value to your products and services? Be even more nice than you are normally?
[...]
Just think about that for a moment. That's 100,000,000 individual downloads of a free product, the alternative legacy application from Microsoft will soon cost you €£430. Oh yes, and those 100,000,000 downloads happened in a year and 16 days...
The report was overwhelming: “ We have no control over our own information systems! And yet that is the one and only area in which we can achieve the necessary gains in productivity.” That day, I came to understand the many needs that are fulfilled by free software and how it is of crucial importance to our country’s economy.
Events this week, mostly at the Université du Québec à Montréal, will promote the benefits of free software and introduce beginners to the open vs. proprietary politics that divide the tech-savvy community.
But the hostility between the two camps is nothing like it was in the past, said Michael Gould, an analyst with Forrester Research. And on the one hand, this is good news for open sourcers.
"A lot of significantly sized companies have been using more open source software," Gould said. "A lot of the concerns they had, like quality, security and support, have been mostly addressed."
The IT department for the Canadian province of Quebec is consolidating hundreds of Oracle databases -- spread across hundreds of midrange servers -- onto a new mainframe running Linux on top of z/VM.